SOURCE: Nolan, Charles J. “Hemingway's ‘The Sea Change’: What Close Reading and Evolutionary Psychology Reveal.” The Hemingway Review 21, no. 1 (fall 2001): 53-67.

In the following essay, Nolan provides a close reading of a much neglected story “The Sea Change,” in order to demonstrate Hemingway's artistry.

In a wide-ranging but rather petulant letter of 16 November 1933 to Maxwell Perkins, complaining about the response of various critics to his short fiction, Hemingway listed “The Sea Change” and several other stories as “invent[ed] completely.” They were not, as one commentator had charged, merely a reporter's transcription of actual events like some of his other works. “The point is,” he went on, “I want them all to sound as though they really happened. Then when I succeed those poor dumb pricks say they are all just skillful reporting” (SL 400). Over twenty-five years later, in 1959, he gave a different account of the story's genesis...